I don’t own an Xbox, just a Playstation 2, so I only ever played this famous game once, for just a few minutes. I also haven’t been playing PC games for a while, because I had a dinosaur of a computer, so I can’t compare it to other first-person shooters.
I had quite a bit of fun last night with Halo. I particularly liked driving around on the surface. It’s a nice combination of 4-wheeling, exploration and combat.
But I have a problem with the game being so demanding of a computer system. I know PC games have a history of being written for tomorrow’s computer system, but my new system is days old. It’s a dual 3 gigahertz system with a gigabyte of RAM and a dual-monitor 3D graphics card. It bloody well should handle games darn well.
Instead, I have the resolution set at 800 x 600, with all the features turned to “low” or “off” and the framerate is barely acceptable.
Oh, well.
I was also scratching my head over the artificial world of Halo. It’s been done, of course, by Larry Niven. I haven’t finished many missions, but I don’t imagine I’ll be seeing the kind of inventive infrastructure I got to read about in Ringworld. I couldn’t even tell if there were shield walls or shield mountains.
What sort of 3D graphics card is it? What brand, what model? Also, do you have the latest drivers installed? I ask this because with those specs, if the game’s not running right in might be something to do with the card.
Man, I hope your PC’s performance is not indicitave of they way it is going to run overall. I have a Athalon XP 2600+ w/ 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce 4 ti 4600. If you can’t play it smoothly on yours I would hate to see what it is going to look like on mine. I can’t wait to go pick it up on my lunch hour.
It’s an Nvidia GeForceFX 5600 256MB Dual Display. Current drivers? I don’t know. The system was delivered August 31.
The game was released two days ago and I bought it yesterday. I’ll check for a patch while I’m at work, but my home system isn’t online.
I don’t believe the game is faulty. It ran solidly. It’s just that the more advanced video options slowed the framerate. I’m very picky when it comes to framerates.
As far as framerates go, anything above 30 fps is techno-masturbatory nonsense. Above that, you aren’t going to detect any noticable difference.
Obviously though, if you’re noticing slowdown or choppiness in the framerate, your game’s probably chugging along at somewher closer to 15-20 fps and with a system like yours there’s really no explanation for it I can come up with.
I’m not seeking faster than 30fps. I can’t even measure my system’s performance. I just see some choppiness at 800x600 with high quality textures on. Higher resolutions are useless to me.
I’ve downloaded the patch. I’ll look for drivers for my card and load all that up tonight.
The reason I like high FPS is that I KNOW it won’t bog down when there is a lot going on, but if you only have 30 FPS when nothing is going on then you are going to bog down if you start stressing your video card. If I never drop down under 30 FPS I’m happy.
Halo is just a bad port. End of story. The graphics are 2 years old and there is no excuse for it being as slow as it is.
The odd part is that a leaked beta 1 of Halo had poor FPS like now, but a leaked beta 2 was much much faster. We seemed to have lost those optimizations between beta 2 and gold.
Athlon 1900+
1 gig PC2100
ATI 9700 Pro.
I have two views on Halo, one is gameplay, which in my opinion is awesome. Movement feels rapid, weapons feels just enough powerful and the driving system, well, that’s the best I’ve ever seen. This is the first time I’ve been able to steer a car with satisfaction without using a wheel.
The other, is level design, what were they thinking? Boring, repetitive levels. On some levels the same piece of architecture was reused over and over again, and not in a very subtle way, more of a “let’s make the players way to victory a little bit longer”. It felt a whole lot like they had 6 hours of gameplay, but really, really wanted it to last for 8. The monsters as well, where’s the variety? And those cutsy little monsters, are they trying to annoy you to death or are they only there to make sure you have less ammo when you face of with the bigger dudes?
Don’t get me started about how they dropped cooperative gameplay from the PC-version. That’s a whole rant in itself.
I see a bright future in Halo mods, because, as I said, the gameplay is top notch and if the levels doesn’t bother you, you’ll most likely find this to be a great game.
“I see a bright future in Halo mods, because, as I said, the gameplay is top notch. However, if the levels doesn’t bother you, you’ll most likely to find this to be a great game.”
Yeah, as for cooperative play being missing on the PC…
I hate driving those cool ATV’s around with the gun just limply rotating around, no one manning it. Or the AI marines that don’t see the enemy until I’m on top of them… Arg.
Are there any night missions? From what I can see of the ring of Halo, it doesn’t seem to fall into shadow, ever. How many suns light it up?
Wait, they dropped co-op play? Damn, my son and I were looking forward to playing together. Wasn’t that one of the big selling points when it came out for Xbox? Why the hell would they drop it? Why do all developers drop co-op play? The last decent co-op play was on Quake II. Damn!
Altho similar in looks to Ringworld, Halo is MUCH smaller. Rather than being ~1AU in diameter, it is only (I don’t remember, 15?) km in diameter. Rather than encircling a star, it is orbit about a gas giant.
If I recall the game correctly, it is thousand of kilometres in diameter; they do say at the beginning of the game, and as I recall it was big enough that I said, “Oh, must be a gas giant it’s orbiting.” The inside of the ring itself looks at least fifty to hundred kilometres across, so it’s very big.
Yes, I could see the size difference. So shadow squares wouldn’t work for night/day. Perhaps if orbital period was a useful length, you could count on a solar eclipse for night.
But such a structure would tend to precess, wouldn’t it? You’d have long periods of oblique sunlight, or even have the thing eclipse itself. Flora and fauna would freeze and die, the atmosphere would freeze out…
While playing the game, there’s a sequence in which you see a model of the ring, as well as the planet-moon system Halo is in. It looks like it’s sitting at the L1 point between the planet and the moon.
That would be a pretty stable position (around a Lagrangian point, the tidal forces attract objects to the point). If the plane of orbit of the moon is the same as the plane of the planet’s orbit, it would provide shadow–how frequently would depend on the details of the orbit.
The repetition of the indoor levels totally ruined the game. Not only do they reuse the same textures and shapes, they also reuse the same exact room layouts over and over again. This makes it very easy to get lost and difficult to assess if you are progressing or back tracking. The design is also very bland and uninspired; none of the architecture seems to serve any purpose other than being sparse monolithic alien structures.
Also, the introduction of The Flood totally changes the gameplay dynamics from fun, tactical skirmishing to a mindless shootout. On the plus side, the AI of the Covenant and your teammates is well done; I really liked storming the enemy with a squad of companions.
None of the guns I’ve come across seem suited to dealing with this ‘Flood’ everyone is talking about. I’m picturing the original Doom when the walls come down and lots of mindless demons come snarling at you in a big rush. That requires a lot of bullets and please don’t make me reload.
The damn assault rifle’s 60-round magazine empties out just when you need it most!
Perhaps the tri-barrel machine gun on the ATV thing would be perfect, but I imagine you don’t get that opportunity often.
I’ve finished it, it’s OK but nothing extraordinary. Unreal 2 was not one of my favorites, but it was a better traditional shooter with more interesting level design than Halo. I liked the vehicle levels, particularly the ships. Steering the Warthog was rather sloppy, like driving a remote-control Jeep on a hockey rink (at least with the mouse).
Agree with the above about the level design, too bland and repetitive in several levels. I got so sick of the level in which you first encounter the flood that I nearly uninstalled the game. Bummer they removed co-op from multiplayer, I’d like to play with companions who don’t throw grenades into the middle of the fray when I’m attacking at close range.
I did appreciate the humorous chatter of the first group of Aliens. The few FPS games which used humor, like MDK 1 &2 and NOLF 1 &2, stand out in my mind from the relentless grim atmosphere of others.